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08/19/2010

the warhol dress.

Thea, off to the market wearing her new dress

Sometime last year, someone sent me a link to this amazing blog - MADE - and I've been swooning over Dana's fun and colorful designs ever since. Lucky for us, she offers a number of free tutorials and patterns. After I finished a couple of market skirts, I felt brave enough to try sewing with knits. So, I started working on a Warhol dress.

The pattern and tutorial were super-easy to work with - Dana gives seriously amazing instructions and great photos to help you along.

It took me a bit to figure out how to actually get my machine to sew knit fabric. I finally got my walking foot working properly, and then I had to fiddle with the tension quite a bit to get it just right. But after that, it was {pretty} smooth sailing.

This version is actually the second one that I put together. Since Thea is very tall, I went ahead and used the pattern for 3-4 years. But it was way too big! The length was okay, but the body of the dress swallowed Thea right up. I took it apart, measured Thea again, adjusted the pattern a bit (I guessed on this, and I think I did pretty well!), and resewed the dress. I think it probably took me a bit over an hour to do it the second time.

Thea loves the dress, and that makes my heart so happy. She asked to wear it again today, and she went crazy dancing and twirling around when I asked if I could take pictures.

We love to sew old "big" things (dad's shirts come to mind) into new little things like doll outfits. Handing down the ability to sew and the love of creating something will always be a gift that only some can give. I'm glad to see how giving and gifted you are! That's one for my Grateful Monday.